Combatting “cyber and different threats posed by the Individuals’s Republic of China” (PRC) is a high precedence for the Division of Homeland Safety (DHS) via the top of 2025, in keeping with a guidance document the division launched final Thursday. The doc describes a “whole-of-society effort” to guard important infrastructure from exterior threats, and China is on the high of the checklist.
Different priorities embody managing the “evolving dangers” of synthetic intelligence and different rising applied sciences, mitigating provide chain vulnerabilities, making ready for local weather change-related dangers to important infrastructure, and addressing dependency on satellite-based companies and communications.
“From the banking system to the electrical grid, from well being care to our nation’s water methods and extra, we rely on the dependable functioning of our important infrastructure as a matter of nationwide safety, financial safety, and public security,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas stated in a statement.
Per the memo, the federal authorities and intelligence group see China as one of many greatest dangers to nationwide safety and are notably involved about China’s capability and “willingness” to conduct cyberattacks on US infrastructure. The memo additionally warns about potential threats from “different malign ‘grey zone’ actions,” together with monetary investments, “conventional espionage,” and insider threats.
This April, FBI Director Christopher Wray stated hackers linked to the Chinese language authorities had accessed critical US infrastructure and had been ready “for simply the correct second to deal a devastating blow.” In a speech on the Vanderbilt Summit on Trendy Battle and Rising Threats, Wray stated hackers with the cyber group Volt Hurricane had breached a number of American corporations within the telecom, power, and water sectors.
DHS established a China Working Group in 2020 to handle the “intensifying menace” of China’s “malign exercise within the commerce, cybersecurity, immigration, and mental property domains,” then-acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf stated on the time.
In 2022, DHS revealed a “strategic motion plan” on combatting China’s threats to nationwide safety, every little thing from immigration violations to mental property rights violations. Motion objects included trying into methods to develop commerce “with fledgling chip sectors and like-minded financial companions, together with India and Taiwan” and prioritizing efforts to guard US infrastructure from “malicious PRC cyber exercise.” And final 12 months, Mayorkas introduced a departmentwide 90-day “PRC Threats Sprint.” Just like the 2022 plan, the dash emphasised the necessity to defend important infrastructure towards potential cyberattacks, in addition to a dedication to utilizing DHS’s immigration enforcement equipment to establish “illicit vacationers” from China who come to the US to “acquire intelligence, steal mental property, and harass dissidents.”
Congress has additionally change into more and more hawkish on China. In 2013, the Home Homeland Safety Committee’s subcommittee on cybersecurity held a hearing on the threats China, Russia, and Iran posed to US infrastructure. The congressional effort to ban TikTok until it divests from its Beijing-based father or mother firm is basically rooted in nationwide safety issues. Earlier this month, the Home Committee on Homeland Safety advanced a bill that may block DHS from shopping for batteries from six Chinese language corporations.
